Do you need to hire a Chief Revenue Officer?
Have you considered hiring a Chief Revenue Officer? Are you even sure of the is the role of the CRO? The CRO is becoming a common job title for organizations of all sizes looking for a single leader to own revenue growth.
Having someone solely prioritizing and focusing on earnings is an ideal complement to the many CEOs' abilities and expertise with backgrounds in products and engineering. As the CRO role grows in popularity, many organizations are prioritizing this role within their C-suite.
What's a CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER (CRO)?
A Chief Revenue Officer is somebody in control of all your company's revenue flows.
They have the ultimate responsibility for driving revenue growth by leveraging and aligning revenue-generating sections: Marketing, Sales, and Customer Experience/Customer Success. They oversee your growth branches, together with the VP of Sales, the CMO, and the CXO (Chief Experience Officer), reporting directly to a CRO.
In the ancient days, the CEO will be responsible for revenue generation. However, as your organization grows, it will become difficult for the CEO to manage this and other crucial strategical challenges essential for growth, such as product development, fundraising, and recruiting.
WHY DO I NEED A CRO?
A CRO will align all your revenue-generating departments.
Alignment across Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success are essential for sustained growth. With no communication between departments, breaks and messages become mixed: your Sales team say one thing, Marketing another, and Customer Success yet.
This leads to Marketing generating many bad quality prospects that Revenue can't close, or Sales closing prices, which are a bad fit, so Client Success then needs to intervene.
A Chief Revenue Officer aligns earnings generation and messaging Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success are all working together to Maximize Revenue. This produces joined-up messaging and a consistent experience for prospects and customers through the purchaser's travel, consequently creating an environment conducive to sustained revenue growth.
WHEN SHOULD MY STARTUP HIRE A CRO?
As your business grows, you'll reach a point where it will be beneficial to hire a CRO to improve alignment and growth. Two key indicators suggest you have reached the end where your business should hire a CRO:
1) YOU'RE STARTING TO EXPERIENCE MISALIGNMENT
Are your expansion branches caught up playing the blame game?
Marketing says Revenue isn't closing enough deals with the prospects they're handing over.
Revenue says Marketing is not generating enough opportunities.
Customer Success thinks they can not retain customers because Sales are closing deals at all costs.
Low quality leads, not closing deals rather than retaining customers all hit your Revenue hard and may be made better by aligning your expansion departments and improving communication between them.
2) GROWTH DECISIONS ARE BEING MADE IN ISOLATION
Is marketing running campaigns that earnings don't know about? or are the campaigns revenue-creating? Many times marketing and sales are doing different things and are not aligned.
These situations equate to missed sales opportunities and lost clients due to fragmented messaging and poor communication between your expansion departments -- and negatively influence your organization’s revenue.
Hiring a CRO will facilitate alignment and enhance collaborative decision-making between your different teams, as the heads of every department report to the same individual and share a single channel of communication.